We Can’t Do It Alone

You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. Daniel 5:27

One of the greatest lies the addict, in his madness, tells himself, is that he can do it alone. I don’t need help. I can quit by myself. In the insanity of his addiction, he refuses help and refuses to follow God. He may pray for miraculous intervention, but he remains unwilling to do what it takes to find recovery.

Like the addict, we all have our own battles. We may not all be enslaved to a drug, but we all have inadequacies and flaws, which we cannot manage on our own. We were not made to do so. When we struggle with that feeling that we are not good enough, it is because we are not. We may struggle with inadequacy for the wrong reason – feeling as if we don’t measure up to others – but the truth is, we are not capable of being who we’re meant to be – before God – on our own.

We were created to live a life dependent upon our creator. A life lived independently of him then, will always be dislocated, fractured, and inadequate. This is where King Belshazzar found himself in today’s passage. In the story, the Babylonian king abandoned God to worship false idols. Speaking through Daniel, God told the king that it was he who held Belshazzar’s breath in his hand (Daniel 22:23). Since the king refused to follow God, his kingdom would fall, and he would die, which happened that very night.

We may think this passage is for others since we already believe in God, but the addict too, often believes. He prays for help. His greatest inadequacy though, is that, like Belshazzar, he simply won’t follow God. He believes God exists, but he follows himself.

We all have struggles and we all have inadequacies. God allows us to have these so that we remain dependent on him. We were not made to do this alone. It is only in daily turning from ourselves to follow God that we find the only adequate solution to our greatest needs. The truth is, we can’t do it alone. The good news of God is that we don’t have to.